Firetraps.
The blue light that connects all things.
The daylight’s warmth enables the eye to tell apart the figures,
the trees.
It’s not the light’s intensity, but the light’s quality, that makes the
difference.
What is possible, and what is not.
The light in the blue hours. A thought, that everything is about
to perish,
the paint flakes from the vitrine like my skin in summer,
the lines around your eyes and mouth, the day disappears.
But here. Seeing it.
The wrecked body, as it might be found on a road.
That sigh as a body hits the ground,
the air expelled from inside.
The blue light is a chute, the day slides towards night.
Differently in the big cities, it’s to do with speed, the traffic
dividing up the sounds in another way.
The blue light enticing with the thought that we are connected now.
We are connected.
The blue light is a blanket that covers the day, a sheet drawn over;
an eyelid drawn down by a finger to cover an eye.
To close a room for the night.
Switch off what is on. Then come back to check.
Make sure.
Pearls begin as grains of sand in oyster shells, later they must be
stringed, or mounted on metal, or placed in a small, soft pouch.
Loose pearls look so abandoned.
Nuts released, exposed in a shatter of broken shells.
Eyes without sockets.
A single shoe, there on the sidewalk.
The roundness that exists in the world is an expression of the
simplest laws of motion.
The laws that govern things that float. The spiralling circles at
a drain.
And the two of us.
When the water runs out, whenever a thing goes to the wall,
motion is rotary.
Shape is a way of communicating, connecting, a way of listening.
From all sides.
The crystals that cast back the light, a pine cone drawing glances.
The sphere or the circle is the strongest form.
A shape that belongs to all things, in that way connected with
winding down as well, united with the winding down of all things.
When you let the water out of the tub and a body remains
stretched out within it.
Do you remember that.
A core, that is more like a shell we fill up in order to see what
we remember.
Mostly I talk about something I miss, the days.
Mostly I believe there is a form into which we two may settle.
Or perhaps not settle at all.
We are travelling at the same speed away from each other.
Everything is moving, at the same distance from a middle.
Something that may put us in touch with the world, on an equal
footing, as it were.
He says photographs can be viewed as a kind of frozen music.
Mostly it’s more him saying it that occupies her.
The spaces bodies create together are also passages of a kind.
The space between his body and hers is also a room, the room
possesses shape.
And is at the same time already a region of memory.
Or at least it shares the shape of a region there.
Magnetism draws the now out of things and connects them with
a place already waiting in memory.
A problem for the shape our bodies have found.
Light is impossible to describe. Or—
it has yet to be done.
She stands at the lakes of Copenhagen, on a path colonised by
swans
Grey, overgrown cygnets.
It’s that time of day, a fade into blue,
like certain fungi when the finger indents the flesh, or bruises
on a thigh.
One could say the light draws a boundary, outlining one thing,
marginalising another.
That on which the light falls, and that on which it falls no lon-
ger—that which exists without.
Whatever place it then may find.
What language can be summoned, to describe that which exists
outside the light.
All that on which the light does not fall.
With what voice
may we speak of darkness.
The facing light that discomforts us, the eye understanding that
we are being conversed, or perhaps: not being conversed at all.
You don’t think there’s anything left to go back to.
One closes one’s eyes, the way a child closes its eyes.
The action of lowering someone else’s eyelids.
Had he done so.
On its descent the sun falls level with the eye and the window sills.
She has left the city behind.
The evening comes with warmth here. Her hand clutches her
pocket, hanging heavily at the side of the chair.
She places both hands on the table in front of her,
between them.
She turns her head, looks out across the sea.
From the table this can be done.
She has come here to walk and to gather up pebbles.
She collects all sorts of things, and pebbles are a fine, fine thing
indeed.
As if noticing the unique character of some particular example,
those aspects of it deemed seldom—
and the very act of bending down over a pile of pebbles and
choosing between them,
the hand that reaches out and casts its shadow upon them—
is reflective of something both smaller and greater at the same time.
The things you started doing as a child, that you carry on doing
after discovering
they can’t really be done.
At least not like that.
To keep something.
Something round that lies in the hand.
Gathered up, and solid.
Pebbles change when removed from the beach. The way a person
is exiled to some other place once something has passed.
Or simply changed.
What surrounds us vanishes when we no longer can be seen in
its midst
in a picture.
One endeavours all the time, with photography, everything, draw-
ing up lists, walking the same paths through the city, sitting down
at the same cafés.
To love the same things.
To make love regularly.
To keep a space close to the body like a necessary item of clothing.
Her mother thinks her daughter would be happier
if she got a proper job.
One that meant she could see people, be of use to others, gain
some perspective on things.
But she sees people all the time, in fact she does little else, she
tells herself.
The spaces in which we are enclosed encroach upon us and
ensheathe us like the thinnest membrane.
He thinks there’s something touching about her when she sleeps;
when you gather pebbles too. Touching.
I am exiled here to this place and mostly I miss everything I knew.
Seeing you in that picture, you and me entwined.
You’ve left the city to walk and gather up pebbles.
There’s something touching about you, when you sleep too.
Like a pebble held in the hand.
Your body has changed,
we have both become saggier in the flesh, bigger and older and
more pathetic.
All that sticks to us.
Cat silver in the sunlight; and you discover it and fill your carrier
bags until they can hardly be carried at all.
Hardly enough.
Can a person find pleasure in anything
existing in the world.
Some place other than this.
Love possibly, or pearls.
We see an image, a beach in autumn.
The light is special, a singular warmth and milky light.
We see only the beach, and hear two voices.
They are talking.
You can’t hear exactly what they’re saying to each other.
We note they speak with caution that perhaps suggests they don’t
yet know each other that well.
(…) no, not very often (…)
(…) wish it on my worst enemy (…)
(…) dream about (…)
(…) that someone might see, or, you know, sort of (…)
(laughter)
Exactly, I know!
They stare down at the sand, her short-cut jacket stretches like
the canvas of a tent when she buries her hands in her pockets.
(…) Sometimes I’m just in doubt as to whether I fit in. If this is me,
or if (…)
(…) A bit like embers that are still warm in the morning, the day after.
That’s right, yeah.
Small beads of perspiration on the chest, in the groin, the small
of the back.
The body fighting against.
He pulls the cover up around his throat with bony fingers.
The empty duvet cover is heavy with warmth and the moisture
of sickness.
He turns onto his side, and the cover peels away to expose his back,
like when you separate sheets of dampened paper.
He disentangles himself and dumps the cover on the floor,
turns onto his back again, his chest rising and falling in compli-
cated rhythm.
He sweats.
We see his chest, the hollows of the collarbones,
the hollow of the sternum, descending to where the ribs part,
the chest as a basket softened in water, willow malleable to a
certain point,
a bead of sweat collecting between the collarbones, then running
down to the neck like a rope.
He shifts his head on the pillow,
another bead, trickling down his upper arm,
travelling a path that follows the muscles exactly like a shadow,
or like water finding its most natural course down a mountain.
It soaks into the pillow. He’s breathing, we see.
The chest as it rises and falls.
Another bead gathers. Suspended, it trembles.
A hair, piercing the bead like a needle.
A section of the hair is magnified by the bead and we study it.
Any line is infinite, it’s all a matter of seeing it up close, a stretch
of coast,
the contours of a grain of sand, the skin perhaps.
She thinks about what the ring might have looked like.
A man’s ring. A man’s ring would be simpler.
If it might still be there, among the ashes, or if it vanished into the
sea, a gleaming iris ring,
when the ashes were scattered;
did the sun gleam,
did the ring fall first; under a cloud of ash
the ring falls.
The bead releases and runs down the back of his arm, into the
shadows there, where we cannot see what becomes of it, out of
frame.
A moist trail left behind on his skin, the area of skin we can see.
It’s hard to say if the trail is lighter or darker than the rest of the
skin.
A surfeit of dust, a monument to slowness and cathedrals never
completed, built only to stand and witness.
Bulbous yellow of trees.
The tulip trees are blossoming here,
the spring is more advanced,
you say: spring has arrived, you should see the light.
A disorder in the beds.
A soft patch in the lawn where once was a tree, a yielding of the
soil.
A chest of drawers, panting green in the room’s depths.
What’s that you’re wearing.
Rooms where the chair has been pulled out in that way, angled
into the space.
She pauses in the middle of the floor, in darkness.
His voice, wrenching the skin from my frame in a single move-
ment; imperceptibly your breathing has made a fine incision at
the nape of my neck, and now you skin me.
What do you want, the man asks her.
The kitchen crackles, and light from the street enfolds the darkness,
wrapping it up in its pallid slough.
We view the scene from the doorway, the room is dark, or nearly
so.
She has got up to fetch a drink of water or tea, is what we assume.
The question is how much to share,
how much of a patient one can be.
How much human being one can import into such enterprise.
The sickness had rooted itself within him, his eyes were like that horse’s we saw, the black mare down on the farm; if you looked hard enough into its eyes you realised the pupil was quite deformed, spongy in the way of coral, growth upon growth. In the right light you could see it clearly. I held my hand to my mouth, it was a warm day in September when we noticed it first; I rode home gently. It turned out to be nothing. So they said.
It was as if his clothing—his shirt, his jeans—was what kept his body upright, displayed in that way, a thin sheet of skin drawn out over the bones.
Faith is one thing when you’re sick, another when you’re not.
The flies in the window look more and more like amber in the glow.
“It’s touching, what your parents are doing,” he says.
“They have to, they love him,” she says.
“They love you,” he says.
“Same thing,” she says.
What price is a person then prepared to pay.
She holds the pearl necklace to her mouth, pressing three pearls
inside like a bit.
I don’t know what to say to her, but I feel the urge to say some-
thing, anything.
The sky is streaked with rain, two different shades of grey, though
to you—I imagine—they are alike.
I miss you. Is it okay to say that.
A single water sculpture on the square, water with no outlet, slowly
flooding the space. Erosion of the ground on which the city stands.
You drink as if alcohol were the answer to a very important
question.
A test that’s been given.
The inner lines and the boundaries between the fields.
The transitions from one thing to another.
Help is near.
What lies closest to the heart.
Some insane changes in the weather reflect in us, as ways in which
we leave the apartment.
When I place my hand on yours, or on your knee, I always get the same feeling, a feeling of not really knowing you. Had we met before, it might have been different. You ask me to do something, get some help, and place a hand on my knee.
There’s a common region for caring and prayer and wanting something. Always on the bounds of what is possible.
The things you describe threaten to fall apart.
To break.
Pain can be traumatic because you discover a connection you thought you already knew. The fact of everything being joined and dependent on something else, of our being in danger together, each of us on our own. I kind of knew that, but it’s the realisation of it and the fact of beli
eving something only then to be caught out not knowing. Whatever else that might apply to. Brittle glass, small, barely noticeable stone-chips in a window, a small error of calculation, the slightest redistribution of weight, and it surrenders and shatters into pieces.
You have to be as vulnerable as possible.
You have to be as aware as possible. My body and that of the other. You have to look beyond yourself. In such a way you’re forever on the brink of dispersing.
Today, while walking in the Botanical Gardens, I didn’t tell you, but with each gust of wind I thought I might be blown apart from you and you would have to spend the rest of the afternoon, and the evening too, putting me back together again; I would lie there like a wing spread out in the snow on the slope just here. You could spend days. Feather by feather, a dead bird, wing drawn open against the dark snow, the way snow is dark at the end of winter; the wing extended, the assymetrical form of its stiff quills laid bare, as if pulled out of place. The space between the feathers looks like a negative of the shape, a larger, dark wing that in many ways seems more assembled compared to the wing’s lighter spaces. The axes of the body, thought upon thought, what resides outside of thought and language resembles the language in reverse; and quite as diffuse is the darkness. The rhythm of the plumage, eleven sails. We entered the greenhouse and pulled off each other’s coats and jumpers and undershirts. I turned, and you unhooked the clasps of my bra, opening it, and there we stood, embracing each other rather awkwardly. Later we would speak of the plant that was blooming there. It flowered for a few days, a week at most, and only once every fifty years, something like that. I could feel your chest very distinctly, rising and falling. I noticed how clear the veins of my body appeared in that light. Or my pale winter skin. I remember wondering if you could sense that I wasn’t breathing, and then you said: breathe. It’s something you say to make me relax, you claim. Maybe it has to do with your fear of me not really hanging together, that I am already dispersed, spread out behind you. All the living and all the dead. How to make room for oneself in such a world.
Deposition is a term used to describe geological material deposited following transport, or as one perhaps should understand it: motion. Three different types of deposit are distinguished: aeolian sediment, consisting of wind deposits; fluvial sediment, deposited by the flow of water; and lacustrine sediment, comprising marine deposits. Glacial sediment, morainic deposits, chemical sediment, salt deposits.
The first image is of the town.
Of Darkness Page 2